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hockles · Mar 22, 2006, 01:00 PM

I have a iMac bought just before Christmas and have set up an external hard drive to store my digital video and if I drag any clips it download to my iMovie in seconds but if I plug the haed drive to my powerbook then it takes such a long time to download like 15 to 20 minutes. Is there a differentfirewire speed in the two machines and if so can I sort this in anyway. Thank you for your time. Kev. UK

Tuoder · Mar 22, 2006, 01:06 PM

You may have a 4200-rpm ATA-66 or ATA-100 HDD in your powerbook, this could contribute to your problem. Your internal HDD may be slower than the external HDD. Could you give more specific specs on your Powerbook?

Maflynn · Mar 22, 2006, 01:16 PM

PB hard drives are definitely slower then external drives.

hockles · Mar 22, 2006, 05:34 PM

Originally Posted by Tuoder

You may have a 4200-rpm ATA-66 or ATA-100 HDD in your powerbook, this could contribute to your problem. Your internal HDD may be slower than the external HDD. Could you give more specific specs on your Powerbook?

Is this my hard drive. Fujitsu MHS2040AT D. I do know it is a 40gb and the machine was bought in America. I have put in another 512 of ram to go with the built in 128. Sorry I'm not more help as I'm a pc convert.

jamil5454 · Mar 22, 2006, 05:54 PM

You could very possibly be running out of RAM on your PowerBook and having to swap to disk. This would explain the huge amount of time to cope a file.

iMovie is very memory hungry last time I checked.

Tuoder · Mar 22, 2006, 09:08 PM

Fujitsu MHS2040AT is your model number. You have an ATA-100 4200-RPM HDD. If your external drive is recent at all, it is probably faster than your laptop internal drive. You may try capturing directly to the external drive. Jamil5454 is probably right, also. The RAM you have added already has probably helped you alot, but more wouldn't hurt, especially with iMovie. Besides that, nothing is actually wrong with your laptop, as far as can be told in a forum.

P.S. Ask a PC user what emulate means sometime. I think that you will find that PC users are less knowledgeable about their computers. I have found this out as a certified PC tech.

ericssonboi · Mar 22, 2006, 10:09 PM

Seems like everyone missed this point..
The Powerbook might be using USB 1.1

What version of the Powerbook is it?

romeosc · Mar 22, 2006, 10:46 PM

Originally Posted by ericssonboi

Seems like everyone missed this point..
The Powerbook might be using USB 1.1

What version of the Powerbook is it?

He said he was using Firewire!

Check out about this mac and see what the system profiler says!

Scott Mackey · Mar 23, 2006, 04:52 AM

Could it be the fact that the external drive is FireWire 800 as is the new iMac, but the old PowerBook's only going to be FireWire 400? Just a wild guess...

Dr.Michael · Mar 23, 2006, 12:29 PM

Originally Posted by Scott Mackey

Could it be the fact that the external drive is FireWire 800 as is the new iMac, but the old PowerBook's only going to be FireWire 400? Just a wild guess...

No. The internal drive might read and write with 18-20 MB per second. This is well below firewire 400 performance. A quick external drive (and also the iMacs drive) can come close to 60 MB/sec.

So the powerbook drive can be responsible for a factor of 3 compared to the iMac.
The idea with firewire 800 and usb 1.1 sounds more reasonable to me. USB transmits 12 MBit/sec = 1.5 MByte/second. The actual data transfer rate is around 1MByte/second. This would make a factor of 60 between powerbook and iMac and thats exactly what the op sees.

hockles:
To help, we need the specs of the powerbook interface and the external drive. Is it a Firewire 800/USB2 drive? Then you have to use the usb connection for the powerbook. Or do you have a firewire 800/400 converter cable? Or has your external drive firewire 800, 400 and usb?

john h · Mar 23, 2006, 12:42 PM

Originally Posted by ericssonboi

Seems like everyone missed this point..
The Powerbook might be using USB 1.1

What version of the Powerbook is it?

I have the same Powerbook G-4 and same HD and same memory. Both USB ports on that computer are 1.1. For $40 he can buy a Cardbus USB 2.0 and have two USB 2.0 ports. Fits in the card slot on the side of the computer. He also has a firewire port if his external drive supports firewire.

hockles · Mar 24, 2006, 08:18 PM

I am using my i MAC G5 to archive all my anologue video through a ADVC box to save to digital into i MOVIE then drag and drop into external hard drive ( freecom 250gb classic sl ). Having saved video to external hard drive I then plugged hard drive into Power book G4 ( 857ghz, 40 gb, 640 ram, 512 added ) using firewire and that is where my problem starts. Thanks to you all for your help. Kev.

Dr.Michael · Mar 25, 2006, 01:22 PM

Originally Posted by hockles

I am using my i MAC G5 to archive all my anologue video through a ADVC box to save to digital into i MOVIE then drag and drop into external hard drive ( freecom 250gb classic sl ). Having saved video to external hard drive I then plugged hard drive into Power book G4 ( 857ghz, 40 gb, 640 ram, 512 added ) using firewire and that is where my problem starts. Thanks to you all for your help. Kev.

The freecom classic sl drives don't have firewire. They have usb2. So on the powerbook this indeed works only with usb 1 speed.

Two solutions:
1 buy a usb2 pc slot card for the powerbook
2 sell the freecom case and get a case with firewire connector